The present invention relates generally to the field of information processing, and more particularly to accelerating instruction execution.
An instruction cycle is the process by which a computer retrieves a program instruction from its memory, determines what actions the instruction requires, and carries out those actions. In many modern CPUs, instructions are not processed one at a time; instead, the instructions are processed in an instruction pipeline. Rather than executing a complete instruction before starting the next instruction, the machine passes a sequence of instructions through a number of stages, each of which performs a part of the overall instruction. These stages of the pipeline typically perform activities like instruction fetch, instruction decode, instruction mapping, instruction queuing, reading a register file, and the like.